


my hero bares his nerves

by paperiuni



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Discussion of War Violence, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Danger Hugging, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8673100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: Dorian puts his skills to use in a way he never thought he would, and Bull puts in a word of comfort.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenityfails](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenityfails/gifts).



> For my darling Katie, a little late but wholeheartedly all the same. ♥

Exhaustion curls around Dorian like a throttling serpent, coil upon coil.

The crunch of his own boots through the snow takes on a dreamlike echo in his skull, like the grind of brittle bones. The evening chill has crusted the patchy drifts of snow, though black earth and moss peek through in places. Setting his feet in the dark seems to consume the last scrapings of his focus. Ahead, watch-fires set around the camp flicker on the sparsely growing pines and cast restless reflections on the still-open lake.

On his left, soldiers move on the long slope that slides down towards the shore. Their lights pass back and forth between the thick, silent trees as they divest the forest floor of every dry branch, twig and curl of bark. 

They took the peat stores from the village cellars, for the bulk of the fuel. No one there anymore that'd freeze in the coming winter.

His fingers ache as they haven't ached in years. He imagines—remembers—the curved needle in his fingers, his knuckles smarting with the rap of Enchanter Melusine's rowanwood pointer. _Steady the hand, Pavus. And recite to me the Surgeon's Rhyme while you continue._

_Silk for sewing, hemp for binding. Ice for soothing, fire for cleansing._

_When all else is done, burn amberthorn by the bed, to calm the heart and the nerves._

Dorian remembers rolling his eyes behind her stooped back as soon as she swerved towards her next victim. What, precisely, were the uses of mundane medicine to a man who could ascend to the airy echelons of Tevinter aristocracy?

_Amberthorn is a wetland plant, Pavus. What are its substitutes in dry climates?_

In the privacy of the camp perimeter, passing between two guards who merely glance his way, Dorian finds a laugh in himself.

His time south of the Waking Sea has been a series of poignant lessons. This day was only one more.

The snow amplifies the twinned moonlight into a diffuse glow that is almost enough to see by. The turned flap of the leftmost tent lets out the yellow shimmer of a lantern; Dorian's shadow swallows it. He turns to fumble at the cords holding the flap.

"You thought to invite this charming cold snap in for the night?" 

"Wanted the air," Bull says, not looking up from his washing. "The tent starts smelling smoky pretty fast."

A camp brazier filled with red-hot coals exudes sap and heat into the tent, adding its notes to the tang of freshly cut pine. _What do you burn when you have no amberthorn?_ Evergreen boughs cover the tent floor in a soft-spiny lattice, meant as insulation. Their packs sit in the corner. Bull's has been opened, but the bedrolls and blankets are still bundled up.

Dorian's fingers mutiny before the trivial task of undoing the knot. He'll wake from his sleep and feel compelled to continue the motions of suturing and wrapping.

By the Inquisitor's order, the scouting force was split in two. One to tend, the other to track. He isn't much of a surgeon, but he'd have been a dismal hunter.

"Well, I would like it _warm_." If it comes out edged in real rather than affected petulance, it's been a long day.

"Let me." Bull looms up beside him, turning his head to skirt the lantern hung on the central pole. The tent is narrow, barely tall enough for him to stand straight. Peat still on his skin, dry and musty. His hands seem steadier than Dorian's, and the flap whispers shut as he releases the knot.

 _Steadier_ is a relative term. The tent holds morsels of promises: quiet, rest, food, if only something eaten cold from their packs—a detour to the camp kitchen feels like a barefoot walk through a mile of ice, now that Dorian's got inside the tent. A haven conjured from canvas and glowing coals. With their blankets and cloaks heaped together, they'll sleep snugly, if they can.

 _I want them found_ , had been the Inquisitor's only verdict. _And them—_ the bodies, half hidden by the falling snow— _I want buried. With all care. Find a revered mother to lead the rites._

She will have to seek her own comforts tonight. As will they all. Some of those they pulled from the snow had yet been breathing.

Bull has a coarse towel over his forearm, the skin of his arms dark with scrubbing. Dorian drops his heavy coat like a husk and lets it crumple inside the entrance.

On his tongue, _Do you have any of the good Antivan brandy left?_ The one that's been sipped over both victories and miseries in the last six months.

Or perhaps, _Shall we see if I remember the rules to the Hand of Rat Red?_ Bull will strip him of his last chipped copper coin, and then he'll make Bull buy his drinks for the next several evenings, whenever they get back to sufficient civilisation for a tavern to appear.

Swaying, Dorian reaches down for the straps of his boots. Bulky, fur-lined things they are, but likely also the only reason he still has all his toes in this cold. He shakes one free, only for his heel to jam itself in the remaining boot.

"Maker's blasted _arse_. Of all the ludicrous, pestilential bothers—"

Bull braces him with an arm behind him, grasping his shoulder unbidden so he has a point of balance against which to work at the offending shoe.

"Can't be that bad if you can still blaspheme in four-syllable words."

"Only you could surmise this day must not have been _entirely_ unwholesome." Dorian steps a socked foot onto the carpet of boughs, slick and rustling. The frost caked on his brows and lashes is melting; he steals Bull's towel to bury his face in the linen.

The lack of a laugh or an answering quip falls like a fine shadow, deepening the edges of things.

The smell of the peat. What else did Bull bring in here, back from his own labours at building the pyres? What did he scrape off his skin into the washbasin, steaming in the corner? The stilled humours of the dead, trod into the snow by the departing killers. The same wanton violence whose marks Dorian witnessed in those clinging to life.

Dorian reaches out again, clumsy, not unwilling. "It's like that, then. I don't suppose you'd want—"

A game. A talk. A tumble. Something in a familiar pattern to guard against the warped and wound course of the day.

Bull's grip shifts on Dorian's arm, his shoulders hunching. Dorian walks his tired fingers along the fading imprints on Bull's forearm, over the contours of bone and sinew and blood vessel.

The thing he wants to speak can't be spoken in the words of their accord.

Whatever ease they give each other, it seeps in through the cracks of more candid engagements. Sharing the tent is common sense in this season. Dorian's slept back to back with men he likes far worse than Bull, and been glad for the heat.

He applied bygone lessons on anatomy and surgery to complete strangers, until he couldn't strain his eyes for another stitch, or summon the will to purify another needle or blade with spell flame.

Could he open his body to pleasure now—to the thing he can always ask for, the brief loss of self and sense that Bull can always give him? A refuge, that too.

The water in the basin reflects the lantern in little ripples of flame, obscuring its true colour or clearness.

So Dorian retreats a step. "Did you finish?"

These aren't the first dead Bull had tended to in his day. Backwards, perhaps, that Dorian should feel the tug of worry for his sake.

"The boss sent me to bed." Bull tarries. "With a _voice_. The kind that said, 'I'll roll you into a blanket and then down the rutting hill myself if you talk back to me.' "

"Where I come from we simply know that as the parent voice." Dorian rubs at his eyes. "I might be astonished that our staid lady Inquisitor has one, but it must make for a handy surprise. I take it you aren't usually on the receiving end."

"Stitches has something like it. Needs to overuse it, though, with that gang of chuckleheads."

"Sometimes I wonder if we are much better. The Inquisitor's illustrious vanguard."

A watchtower guarded the road three miles to the north, hung with the banner of the Inquisition. At least no one had thought to nail a sign to it such as they put up in the Hinterlands, _Under protection of the Inquisition_. Dorian would toss that plaque into the first pyre himself.

Whom did they protect here? The ice-flaked corpses the scouts hauled from the well, or the men and women whose end was eased by a draught of elfroot and dreamslip when it was too late to defend their lives?

"You did good today." Bull says it as if around a lump in his throat.

Dorian blinks up at him, then swiftly away before his face can twist into some unbecoming mixture of relief and confusion. "Is that your opinion as an expert in havoc and mayhem of this sort?" Such spines in his tongue. 

"Yeah, it is." And Bull's capacity not to rise to the bait rescues Dorian once again: it cuts through his thorns like a pair of spring-sharp shears. "You didn't shirk and you didn't bellyache. Just went where you could help."

"Right. I'm not so ill acquainted with messy demises. I do prefer it when they come to deserving targets."

"Tell you something?" Dorian had nearly forgotten Bull's hold of his arm. Now his fingers tighten, and Dorian braces into him a fraction. "We looked at this war and put our feet right in the fat festering heart of it. 'We'll keep you safe' is a fine rallying cry, but as truth, it's a crock of dogshit."

"Wasn't that why you brought the Chargers to the Inquisition in the first place?" Dorian says. "I imagine that is why I brought myself. I must probably be forgiven a few more illusions of grandeur than you, though."

"That's the thing." Bull shuffles back a step and Dorian follows him, deeper into the warmth of the tent. "You shoulder the lives of other people, and you make yourself a mummer. Give 'em a hope that you'll help them. Then comes the part where you hammer that hope into actual fact however you can."

_This is the way you talk when you spent the day carrying bodies to the pyres. Doesn't anything dent your cheer?_

It isn't cheer that Dorian hears in Bull's voice, or clemency.

"Then I—perhaps we both did our share of hammering." It takes both of Dorian's hands to wrap around Bull's one, his thumbs meeting on the wide back of it, the bones of the palm fanning out beneath the skin and the pads of Dorian's thumbs.

"Plenty of work left for tomorrow."

"If we are to stay faithful to your adage, I agree." 

Best, then, to sate the exhaustion of the body, if stilling the mind might be impossible.

 _It's embrium_ , Dorian thinks. _Embrium can be used in place of amberthorn incense to settle the restless. If needful, burn it for both the wounded and the healers._

Bull lets Dorian trail his thumbs idly along his hand for a moment before he asks, "You want a hug, then?"

It startles Dorian into an incredulous glance up— _I don't suppose you'd want to be held_ —and Bull meets him with a narrowed eye, the damnedest dreg of mirth at the corner of his mouth. Nothing wry about the question itself.

"Andraste's merciful eye," he whispers. "You are going to end up keeping so many secrets of mine that I'll have to either kill you or keep you one day."

Bull turns him gently in the circle of his arm, his left one coming up to gather Dorian in. Dorian gives a desultory, defeated chuckle against Bull's shoulder and lets his own arms span as much of him as possible. Bull's heart leaps into a harder pace, his chest rising under Dorian's hold, and then falls, falls, falls into deep slow beats that bespeak an honest ease.

Dorian strokes a palm across Bull's back for as long as it takes for that calm to come over them both.

From hopes into truths. Breathing in, Dorian feels Bull’s hold as another pinnacle, growing solid around him.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Dylan Thomas.
> 
> Final word of approval from Toft, for which I'm much obliged.


End file.
